For five years, Vicky Ni has been battling lung cancer – a diagnosis that came out of nowhere in 2019 after seeing a doctor for shoulder pain.
“He was taking X-rays of my neck, and it was only by chance that the bottom corner of the X-ray showed a raised diaphragm,” Ni said. “I was stunned beyond words.”
The 54-year-old lawyer and mother of two is now part of a medical mystery: lung cancer in non-smokers, Asian American women had been increasing for over a decade before Ni was diagnosed.
“I thought I would get chemotherapy and be done with it. It was only later, when I met an oncologist, that I learned that I was stage 4 and therefore incurable,” Ni said.
Among Asian women diagnosed with lung cancer, 57% are non-smokers, according to a study by California’s leading medical centers. For all others, only 15% of women diagnosed had no history of smoking.
Ni says she doesn’t believe she was exposed to cancer-causing chemicals and didn’t grow up in an area with heavily polluted air. As a non-smoker, she was not eligible for lung cancer screening.
“Currently, screening guidelines driving what is covered by insurance,” said epidemiologist Scarlett Gomez.
Gomez and epidemiologist Iona Cheng of the University of California, San Francisco, received a $12.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute.
“Some of the factors we’re studying certainly include exposure to second-hand smoke, high exposure to cooking oil fumes is an established risk factor,” Gomez said, adding that recent cellular studies suggest that a mutation Particular genetics could predispose people to being more vulnerable to air pollution.
At New York University’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, Dr. Elaine Shum is randomly testing 1,000 Asian women for free.
“We will certainly need a much larger study to actually provide the evidence needed to try to change the guidelines one day, so that other populations can be offered low-dose CT scans by insurance companies” , Shum said.
Potentially changing the guidelines for earlier detection will not affect the outcome for Ni and her husband David. “Like any cancer, it affects the whole family,” David said.
But it could offer hope and spare other families the same suffering in the future.
Elizabeth Cook
